Small black ink yin yang circle with a tree of life design on the inner forearm, with chains and bamboo leaves in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin yang tree of life on the inner forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small circular yin yang motif with a tree whose trunk, branches and roots run across both halves. The design is drawn in fine black linework with solid black shading in the dark half. It sits on the inner forearm near the wrist, with chains and bamboo leaves framing the arm.

Botanical Forearm Yin yang Tree Root Branches Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old signalman at Coldharbour Halt would not let anyone cut the sapling that came up between the rails, though the permanent way gang swore at it every spring. It grew where the morning sun reached the east platform and the goods shed threw its shadow across the west, and its trunk stood in the gap like a man balanced on a boundary stone. People said the roots ran under both tracks and met beneath the signal box, where they tangled and could not be pulled apart.

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In the winter of the great frost, a girl called Nell Ashdown came to the halt holding a ticket for the last train and not enough coppers for the difference. Amos Cray, the signalman, gave her his stove and a heel of bread. She asked him why he kept the tree. He said his father had told him that the light side and the dark side of a thing grow from the same root, and a line that runs through only one of them comes to the buffers sooner or later.

She stayed three nights. On the third the frost lifted and the sun came low over the embankment, and Nell saw the tree's shadow lie across the lamp-lit boards in the same knotted lines as the grain of the bench. Amos held his lamp up to the bough and found the buds had opened pale on one side and dark on the other, like the two halves of a split ledger page.

Nell took the milk train east the next morning and never bought a ticket for the halt again. That spring the gang came with their saws, and Amos stood in front of the sapling until they gave up and walked back down the line. By the next summer two trunks had risen from the one root, one leaning towards the sun and one towards the shade, and the signals ran true beneath them.